Reflection for Day 1

Today I had a new cross-disciplinary subject which is Effective Internet Research. The schedule for this subject look pretty tight as we had almost seven hours of lessons per and we will be completing in whole subject in just nine day. To me, that seems a bit rush. I cannot imagine looking at the big stack of lectures notes given to me and we had to read it for our up-coming test.

This subject will be very useful to us in the future as we will often have to do research for our projects and usually we will be overloaded with information on the Internet. We had to be sure to only pick the better information. Furthermore not all information on the Internet are correct, we must be able to tell what are right and what are wrong. We can do so by cross-referencing different sources.

At the start of the lesson, we had learnt what is the different between Internet and World Wide Web (WWW). I had understood that Internet is just linking computers together to form a big network while WWW is a large set of interlinked hypertext documents accessed via the Internet. We also get to know the different type of websites that are available on the Internet and what are their uses.

We had also learnt the different between Wiki and blog. Wiki is website which allows anyone to edit the content while for blog only the owner can edit. Community spirit is often found in Wiki as people will correct the mistake in Wiki to make it a better place for resource. One of the examples is the famous Wikipedia, where it has information on almost anything. However I hardly use it as my source of research because there are too many people using it.

Personally I don't like to blog. Even then, I did have a few blogs in the past. One of it is my personal blog which I closed it down shortly are I created it. The two other blogs that I created were for my projects in my secondary school. Many people that don’t blog said that blogging is a waste of time. However my reason for not blogging is not because it is a waste of time. I simply don't like the idea of sharing my personal life and detail on the Internet. After all there is no privacy on the virtual world.

We had discussed on the various types of websites and their purpose. For example a business and marketing websites will include detail and pricing on the products. A movie website will have review on the movie.

I think that the activity which needs us to go online and shop is very enriching. We were given a virtual $500 to spend virtually. If there was a choice, I will rather save it, but one way to overcome recession is to spend the money. I had never really shop for stuffs that I need online because I still don't completely trust the product that are on the Internet. The reason is that there are many scam cases on the Internet. I will usually look up the detail and price of the product that I want on the Internet before going down to the store and purchase it. I always do that because at least I will know what to expect at the store and save much more time than looking at it in the shop itself. More comparison can also be done as we can gather lots of information regarding the product on the Internet. However online shopping is getting more popular now because with that, people do not need to step out of the house to purchase something. I have friend that also set up a mini store using her blog to sell her used items. Online store is easy to maintain and there is also no expensive rent as compare to setting up a shop in the mall, hence the profit margin will be larger.